Regeneration

At a party this weekend, a friend was telling me about woodland management, which is something I knew nothing about. He was telling me there is more to it than simply cutting down trees. I'd always thought that our need for wood had to be an endless compromise, with the trees always losing; we've decided that whatever we need the wood for is more important than having a living, breathing tree, and that decision is final. I'd always thought that a tree grows, and gets cut down, and then that's it.

What I hadn't appreciated is that trees grow back. Even if you cut the tree down to a stump, almost to ground level, it will send out shoots that will grow into new trunks, and in the meantime the space you have made allows the light to get through to give everything else growing in the woodland a better chance to get big and strong.

This initially sounded like magic to me - self-regenerating trees - but the fact that all it takes for trees to do this (species permitting) is a little care and planning , that you can manage a woodland so that it can keep providing you with a source of wood but at the same time still be a functioning part of its ecosystem, that cutting down the tree to make something doesn't need to be the end, that if you treat it well the tree will keep providing for you and those who come after you, all this made me really excited. A woodland can be sustainable if we just allow it to be so.